Wave Trip

In real life, most astronauts are practical-minded pilots, engineers, and scientists. Fortunately, that’s not true in video games, where an astronaut can be a geometric shape floating through alien landscapes to dreamy music. That’s the case in Wave Trip, a game for those who always wanted Defender to be a little more psychedelic.

There’s a whisper of a plot in Wave Trip. Your astronaut is rescuing his stranded friends — also geometric shapes — by flying over orange and blue objects and avoiding pink shapes. The orange shapes score points. The blue shapes build up a bonus multiplier. The pink shapes trash your bonus multiplier, which is why you avoid them. Every time you pick up all the orange shapes on the screen, your friend flies away to safety and you get new orange or blue shapes to pick up.

Triangle Man hates Particle Man

The twist is that all these shapes are musical notes, and picking them up creates the soundtrack for the game. Each level is a song that you play, and exactly what the song sounds like depends on the order in which you pick up the notes scattered around the screen. That’s cool.

There’s also a full level editor. Building your own song levels is quick and easy, as is sharing them with other players. A beginner can create and upload something that sounds interesting in five minutes, while expert players are already uploading elaborate tunes. That’s really cool.

There’s just one problem. The only way to fly your ship is to touch the screen. While you touch, the ship goes up. Don’t touch, and the ship dives to the ground. That’s terrible.

Commercial video games have been around for over 40 years now. We’ve learned a few things about how controls work, and one of the near-universal basics if that if you’re not touching the controls, your avatar’s path stops changing. You may keep moving due to inertia — that goes back at least as far as Asteroids — but you don’t suddenly start going in the opposite direction. There are exceptions like Lunar Lander, but Atari built 70,000 Asteroids cabinets and less than 5,000 Lunar Lander cabinets. Asteroids had guns, but it also had the better controls.

Neighborhood Watch

Wave Trip would be fantastic with a simple “slide up and down to move” control system. In fact, it would have worked well with a Pong-style paddle control, which is what started us thinking of classic arcade games. But swooping up and down with precision requires a constant tapping pattern that seems to have nothing to do with the other rhythms of the game. You can master flying, and Wave Trip’s leaderboards boast impressive scores by the players who have done it, but it’s a pain.

Fortunately, there’s another way to play. The obstacles don’t kill you, so you can fly through the whole game and never dodge or use your shields. We had a lot of fun building levels, downloading others’ levels, and flying around listening to the tunes — much more so than we did trying to score points. If that’s the kind of player you are, then you may not enjoy Wave Trip as a game, but you’ll have a lot of fun with your trippy space music toy.

Connect with us

Latest Recommended Games

The fine folks at Milkbag games have released Sidewords. A fun little diversion of a word game that is the devil child of crosswords and scrabble. For each level in the game the grid must be completed to win the level — this means that each letter at the top and side must be used. And not just the top or side, but each word must be made up of letters from the top and side to create a grid. It’s a pain, but in the right kind of way. Even the simplest of the levels can be a head scratcher until you get used to the game. Well worth the $3 as a diversion while we wait for Milkbag to finally release Snow Siege.

We’d like to thank our sponsor for this week, Zap Zap Kindergarten Math.

It’s not always easy to tear your kids away from their tablets and make them do something edifying. Thankfully, Zap Zap Kindergarten Math relieves you of this task by turning mathematics into a fun touchscreen video game. Win win!

Aimed at children 3-6 years old, the app makes math fun by ‘gamifying’ it, turning simple mathematics problems into little challenges so that your pre-schooler can learn and play at the same time.

There are more than two dozen mini-games, split across three categories: Numbers, Shapes and Measurements, and Add and Subtract. According to the developer the difficulty of these puzzles is adaptive too, so kids of any ability can be both encouraged and challenged.

Mini Dayz has launched and it’s a pixelated 2.5D open world that’s as brutal as the desktop version. In this game, the player is dumped on shore with nothing. They must scavenge around for food, water, and weapons while avoiding attack. It’s the kind of game where the goal is to stay alive as long as possible. But that will never be very long. It’s oddly free and seems to only have an ad on the main screen — for now.

Pewter Games has brought their charming point and click adventure The Little Acre to iOS. It’s an amazingly beautiful animated adventure set in a sort of hybrid magical / alien world. A great all ages adventure and very fun.

We’d like to thank our sponsor for this week, The House of Da Vinci by Blue Brain Games. There’s a reason Leonardo Da Vinci is the only renaissance figure who routinely shows up in video games you know. With his remarkable inventiveness and genius for creative problem-solving, Da Vinci was a gamer through and through. He was just born 500 hundred years too soon. Thankfully, there are studios like Blue Brain Games to bring him to life in videogame form. The House of Da Vinci, which comes to us courtesy of a hugely successful Kickstarter campaign, is a puzzler that seeks to channel the artistry and innovation of its title character.

You play as one of Da Vinci’s more promising apprentices, and you have the challenging task of trying to work out where the hell he’s gone. Was he assassinated by the church? Who knows. Has he quietly gone into a retirement? Perhaps. Did he accidentally invent a shrink ray and shrink himself down to the size of an dustmite? Probably not. Da Vinci’s workshop looks beautiful, thanks to some impressive 3D graphics, and the in-game environment is crammed with all the elaborate machines and crazy inventions you’d expect to find in the workplace of a renaissance genius.(more…)

Poly Bridge is out now on iOS, and it’s good to have it! It’s a great game and many seem to agree that it’s the best bridge builder game available. But the iOS versions, so far, is missing the sandbox mode. I would hope that it’s coming soon in an update. If you are all interested in physics puzzlers, grab this one. (Note: the video is for the PC version, I have yet to see a trailer for the mobile version, the developer Dry Cactus isn’t that great at marketing…)

Advertisement

Apple, the Apple logo, Apple Watch, iPad, iPhone, and Apple TV are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. App Store is a service mark of Apple Inc. Other terms may be trademarks of their respective companies.